The Video E-Commerce Platform

The project is a fully customizable video player with an embedded e-commerce solution featuring a billing system and a statistics module. The system is designed to make on-line advertising more efficient and can be integrated with any Web site or social module. It processes user requests to make automated selections of relevant goods and commercials that are displayed to the customer in a form of a list. While watching a video customers can view the advertised items along with detailed information about them including shipment conditions and taxes. They can place an order and even pay for their purchase with the video running in the background.

Once a user buys a subscription, the provider gives them access to the administration panel. The platform offers several subscription plans with various players, storage size, counters, etc. The application allows for advanced customization. You can adjust the player size and the number of items displayed to the customer, the price and availability of items as well as shipment conditions and other things. The intuitive GUI makes the whole system very user-friendly.

The customer is a service provider who turned to Altoros to help them redesign the existing Video E-Commerce Platform, implement new architecture, and develop a new user interface with an HTML5 player from scratch. The company needed a video player with an embedded e-shop that could be easily integrated with any Web page or social network. The design and content were to be highly customizable to the needs of customers. The application had to be cross-platform and run in any Web browser including the versions of iOS. As integrating a Flash application into a Web page may cause difficulties, the customer wanted a simple solution to that as well.

The main challenge was to fully implement HTML5, a technology that still does not have universal standards. Every browser supports its own video format, so the video player had to adjust and run videos in all of them.

In order to ensure that video content is displayed properly in every browser, the team had to implement a complex business logic solution. It analyzes the environment and automatically configures the necessary parameters.

It was also necessary to efficiently integrate the system with third-party modules and resources in order to implement the required functions.

The international team of developers working on the project included members from the USA, Belarus, Russia, and India. Due to the difference in time zones, it was sometimes challenging to coordinate work and schedule video conferencing.

The Java development team collaborated to create a comprehensive solution that would meet the customer’s requirements.

Altoros developed a module that automatically converts videos uploaded into the player into three popular formats supported by all browsers. This solved video compatibility issue. The files are stored on the Wowza Media Server that uses CDN. The system determines the user’s location and selects the nearest nodes to ensure flawless streaming.

The application has a Flash and an HTML5 version to make sure that users will be able to watch videos on any desktop of mobile client, including iOS devices. Once a video starts, the application checks, if the browser supports Flash and starts streaming either in Flash or HTML5 accordingly. This process only takes a fraction of a second and the user does not notice any difference in video quality or streaming speed.

To resolve the issue with different standards in the browsers, the team worked out a complex algorithm that ensured the application compatibility.

In order to solve the issue with different HTML5 standards in browsers, the team created a complex algorithm that ensures the application’s compatibility.

Our customer wanted to use the OpSource cloud hosting, so Altoros developed a special module for it. When a user buys subscription, the module automatically creates the entire infrastructure. If any system errors occur, an automatic report is generated to enable manual configuration.

The team also implemented a new security solution for the billing module. The system does not store any data related to users’ credit cards as well as their bank and PayPal accounts. When this confidential information is entered for the first itme, it is encrypted and sent to the BrainTree server. From that moment all other transactions are carried out with the help of a unique token (user ID). This makes the whole system much more secure.

The media platform for enterprises and the new video player with built-in e-commerce capabilities allows for efficient content monetization and sales. The application has already been successfully implemented by a number of e-commerce companies.